Prescription for a Superior Existence Read online

  In several respects, though, I was doing poorly and getting worse. My insomnia, for example, was out of control. I’d always had trouble sleeping, but since receiving an email in November from my biological mother, I’d found it nearly impossible. Then came an unfortunate work-related incident in Chicago. Then my break-up with Camilla. Then my surgery, which I feared meant that at heart I was vain and shallow, a slave to the body image stereotypes I’d rejected for so long as demeaning and oppressive. Then my back and wrist pain increased. Then I realized that, unable to change my diet following the surgery, I was on course to quickly regain every one of the eighty pounds I’d lost, that the case for my guilt was about to get stronger.

  And my real troubles had not even begun.

  On Tuesday, after finishing and sending the Danforth file to Mr. Raven, I asked my coworkers if they wanted to go to a bar after work to unwind, but everyone either had plans or was too tired or had stopped drinking. At eight o’clock, with nothing left to do at the office, which was empty—Alfredo had come and gone early—I went home and downed three tall whiskeys and put a corned beef in the oven, along with rice on the stove. A radio show broadcasted news that Greenland was splitting apart due to softened permafrost from rising annual temperatures; the war had claimed another 107 lives; an earthquake near Seattle was reported, the size and effects of which weren’t known; and there was now consensus among economists that we were in the middle of a recession, housing market slump, and dollar devaluation that hadn’t spurred a consequent rise in demand for U.S. exports. A terrible trifecta. The alcohol relaxed me, and the hours until I could return to work in the morning—when I would again be around people, with a purpose, liberated from my own thoughts—seemed endurable.

  As I refilled my glass with ice, the doorbell rang. I thought it might be my brother, Sid, stopping by to borrow money or set me up with another of his girlfriend’s friends (as payback or pay forward), but it was Conrad’s student from the night before. She wore tight brown slacks and a short white blouse with stressed buttons, and her shiny straight black hair brushed the top of her shoulders and cut across her forehead with Cleopatra precision. Her name was Teresa, and she had come to apologize for keeping me awake during her lesson. She knew what I’d suffered because a neighbor of hers who built birdhouses was always hammering something at odd hours. She shouldn’t have agreed to a lesson so late at night.

  “It’s not your fault for agreeing,” I said. “It’s Conrad’s for suggesting.”

  She tugged on the bottom of her blouse, bringing her nipples into bas relief, and wedged a thumb into her front pants pocket. “Thanks for understanding.”

  “Sure.”

  “I was afraid I’d have to beg.”

  “No.”

  “Can I use your bathroom?”

  “Right now?”

  “I just drank a big bottle of water.”

  Although I usually welcomed the chance to let beautiful young women into my apartment—despite its rarely, actually never, happening—I hesitated. She was lying. I couldn’t say how or why I knew this, only that it was so. Heat gathered around my neck and crept slowly up my face like an allergic reaction.

  “I’m in the middle of making dinner,” I said, not widening the door.

  “I’ll be half a minute.”

  “My toilet isn’t completely reliable.”

  “Please.” She smiled and revealed two rows of evenly set, glistening white teeth, evidence of great luck or money or discipline as a child. The radio was an indistinct babble in the background. Maybe, I thought, I was being irrational and drunk, and there was nothing suspicious about this woman or her request. She bit her lower lip and I stepped aside to make way for her.

  Back in the kitchen I found milky water bubbling from the rice pot into a moat around the burner’s flame. This was typical of how ineptly I cooked, because of which I had recently contracted with the woman who cleaned my apartment every other week to make and deliver frozen batches of food—enchiladas, chicken mole, lasagnas—on her workdays. The last of her latest delivery was gone, though, and I didn’t remember when she was scheduled to return.

  A minute later Teresa stood framed in the kitchen’s entrance, wiping wet hands on her hips, imprinting black finger marks on her slacks like daguerreotype shadows. “I hate leaving someplace and then realizing I should have used the bathroom. My family never went on vacations, so as a kid I wasn’t trained to always go before getting in the car. A lot of what we do instinctively comes from our nine-year-old self.”

  Again I felt a slurred apprehension and concentrated on cleaning the stovetop. The water had evaporated to leave a layer of dried white froth like old sea foam cobwebbed on the beach. From the beginning there had been so much longing that I could hardly bear it. “You remembered to use my bathroom.”

  “That’s because of the water. It’s like an alarm clock for me. Did you know that on nights before they were going to wage battle, Native American warriors drank gallons of water so they’d wake up early and get the jump on their enemies?”

  I grunted no and pulled from the oven the corned beef, a loaf of grayish meat with a scrim of yellow fat around its sides, as the radio announced that an Amazon-born virus with a thirty-six-hour incubation period had killed twelve people in the last week. Epidemiologists expected it to travel far and wide over the coming months. I flipped on the stove fan and trimmed off the fat and sipped at my whiskey while Teresa picked up a piece of junk mail lying on the counter.

  Burning my thumb on the oven pan, I turned to her and shouted, “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s my mail.”

  “It’s just a PASE brochure.”

  “Please leave it alone.”

  “Are you a Paser?”

  “That’s—Why are you still here?”

  “I want to help you clean up.” She indicated the dishes in the sink, torn seasoning packets by the cutting board, blackened hand towels, and a grease-spattered calendar tacked above a sink full of brackish water.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “To make up for last night. Because I’m nice.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She let go of the brochure and lost her veneer of friendliness and the pain in my thumb seemed unimportant. Conrad, when talking on the phone to his first-ever student, would not have vetted her closely, and in the final analysis nobody could safely say what another person wasn’t capable of. She stepped forward and I braced myself, my right hand a foot from the knife block, ready for what might follow, be it loud or quiet, and the moment was starting to feel very drawn out when she leaned in and kissed me. A button of her blouse came undone at the sternum, pressed against my chest.

  “There’s no need to be hostile,” she said, pulling back as a thread of saliva bridged our lips, her green eyes as limpid as a secluded pool. She held the intimacy for twenty seconds and I grew painfully erect. “That’s why I came over, so we could be friends.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, wiping my mouth.

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Women don’t just walk into strangers’ apartments and kiss them.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Everyone knows.”

  “Maybe everyone’s not as smart as they think they are.” She turned around. “At this rate, you have a minute to stop me from reaching the front door.”

  She walked carefully, one foot precisely in front of the other, as though on a gymnast’s beam, out of the kitchen. A voice told me to let her go and lock the door behind her and return to my dinner and later fall asleep on the couch. In the morning I would go to work and, except for five or ten solitary adventures, forget Teresa as easily as I’d forgotten all the other women who’d taken friendliness with me only so far. You learn to release because otherwise you’re pulled in directions you can’t go. But even as I registered this warning, wondered if being thin could make so much difference in my attractiveness to women, and though
t about newspaper accounts of femmes fatales who seduced men in order to rob them or turn their bodies over to the internal organ black market, as well as about the venereal risks involved in sleeping with someone so brazenly pursuing anonymous sex, I ran to the living room and then the front door and then the common space from which both the stairwell entry and the elevator were visible. I was too late. She’d gone.

  When I got to work late the next morning at 9:45, having dozed off just before my alarm sounded and then slept for an hour, most of my coworkers were putting on their coats and crowding around the elevator, making quiet conversation and picking hairs from their clothing. One stood motionless off to the side with his eyes closed, leaning against the wall as if asleep or recovering from a dizzy spell. They were all men.

  The office, despite its vaulted ceilings with propeller fans, felt particularly warm and close that day, like a ship hold. My cubicle mate, Max, talked on the phone and stared at the kidney-shaped glass bowl between his desk and mine, in which a Japanese fighting fish swam through Neptune reefs and arched castle gates, trailing a gossamer of skin. I loosened my tie and unbuttoned the top of my starched yellow shirt and, feeling the nausea pangs that stabbed me every morning, held my stomach as if to keep it from swelling back to its former size.

  “Max,” I said. He shook his head, switched the phone to his left hand, and wrote “angry girlfriend” on a piece of paper.

  Across the room Elizabeth, Mr. Raven’s secretary, waved me over to her desk. I had invited her out to dinner the week before, and although she’d begun refusing before I’d finished asking, it seemed possible as I walked across the houndstooth carpet that she was one of those women with a default no response that, although it cost her a few good dates, saved her from the many undesirable men who saw deliberation as foreplay, and that, breaking character, she had reconsidered me. In a flattering blue pantsuit, she smiled and poured steaming water from a tulip-decorated teakettle into a matching cup.

  “Are those new earrings?” I asked.

  “You’re late and—”

  “They bring out the auburn in your hair. Where’s everyone going?”

  “The sexual harassment sensitivity course at the Prescription for a Superior Existence Station,” she said.

  “I forgot that was today. Only men seem to be leaving.”

  “That’s the directive.” She squeezed a lemon wedge into her teacup, beside which a pewter condiment caddy held honey, sugar, cream, and echinacea powder. “Mr. Raven asked me to remind you that he needs the Danforth file by four o’clock.” Her eyebrows, sharpened and defined and darkened since I’d last seen them, came together as she looked up and curled a ginger lock of hair behind her ear. She had not reconsidered me.

  “I emailed it to him yesterday,” I said.

  “He must not have gotten it.”

  “I’ll send it again.”

  She nodded and I returned to my computer, where I found no record of the email in question. Also, the Danforth file I opened was not the one I’d worked on for eight hours. The date and time of its last modification was Monday afternoon, when Philippe had given it to me.

  “We broke up again,” said Max, shutting off his phone.

  “My Danforth file has been replaced with an older version,” I said.

  “She thinks I hate her brother.”

  “This is impossible.”

  “Everybody hates him. She says other people just don’t understand him, and since I’ve spent so much time with her family I’m supposed to see past his unattractive qualities, but it’s precisely because I’ve been around him so much that I can’t stand him and don’t want him over for Seder.” He turned off his computer and desk lamp. “Come on, let’s go. We’re the last guys here.”

  “I can’t redo Danforth today and go to a training seminar at the same time.”

  “You have to go. You’re a man.”

  “Mr. Raven wants the file by four.”

  “Your absence would be noticed in a big way.”

  Discreetly but unmistakably Max was referring to the conference in Chicago I had attended in January with my squadmates, one of whom, Juan, had used a company credit card for our six-thousand-dollar gentlemen’s club bill. Although he later called and finessed the charge down to a more realistic thirty-seven hundred dollars, and in spite of company policy not to reveal employee money matters, the story got out and the four of us were forced to give the Employee Conduct Board a lurid and damning account of our trip.

  “Is Mr. Raven still here?”

  “He left twenty minutes ago.”

  “What about Mr. Grobalski?”

  “Gone too.”

  Max handed me my coat and I followed him out slowly.

  It’s hard to say if I would have been more open to the seminar if Danforth hadn’t hung over me that morning. I knew I could be more sensitive—as much as the next man, certainly—but I was wary of the involvement of Prescription for a Superior Existence. Maybe I shouldn’t have been. Beyond what was common knowledge, all I knew then about PASE was that its founder, Montgomery Shoale, a rich venture capitalist, had self-published The Prescription for a Superior Existence, a thousand-page book that introduced and explained the eponymous religion, nearly two decades ago, when it was widely considered a vanity project designed to lend depth and credibility to his company training seminars—he had built a reputation around the Bay Area for speaking about intra-office social cohesion and running more time-efficient meetings—until eventually PASE’s religious bona fides were established and the IRS granted it tax-exempt status as a faith-based organization. When the Citadel, the flagship building of its Portrero Hill headquarters called the PASE Station, became the sixth-tallest structure in San Francisco, there was speculation that Shoale would go bankrupt, but instead he expanded the operation by building the Wellness Center, a four-acre campus in Daly City where people could study PASE intensively. Then he started the PASE Process, a charitable organization that infused money and crackerjack administrative staffs into underfunded soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and daycare centers in low-income areas of the city. It also gave grants to arts companies, medical research labs, and neighborhood development centers. At some point within the last couple of years a small but high-profile group of celebrities had begun talking in interviews about their conversion to PASE, and it had made international headlines the previous spring when the French government objected to its building a Wellness Center in Marseilles. That surprised me because I’d thought PASE was strictly a California phenomenon.

  In general, though, I didn’t think about it. The West Coast gives birth to several religions annually, and although PASE had lasted longer and was better financed and more diversified than most, like them it seemed destined to struggle for a place on the country’s spiritual landscape before fading into the same horizon that had swallowed New Thought, the I AM movement, and hundreds of indigenous American faiths before it. If anything, it was at a disadvantage to the others because it condemned sex in every form; I couldn’t imagine it attracting more than a few thousand followers at any one time. Yes, PASE looked likely to burn through a dry distant swath of the population without threatening the green habitable land in which I lived.

  Max and I pulled into a thirty-story parking garage at the Station and found a space sliced thin by two flanking armor-plated vans on the top floor. In the street-level lobby of the adjacent Citadel we joined our coworkers grazing on donuts and coffee, waiting for the seminar to begin. Max stopped to talk to someone and I went in search of the bathroom, along the way grabbing two maple bars and an apple strudel from the buffet table, which I ate crouched down in a stall. I returned to find Max with Dexter and Ravi at the orientation booth discussing the unemployment figures that had just been released and the crippling effect these would have on next quarter’s accounts retention.

  “You guys seen Mr. Raven?” I asked.

  Max pointed to a wall covered with pamphlets and book displays, beneath a giant vide
o banner that said “Keep the PASE,” where Mr. Raven was talking to a member of the board of directors I’d only seen at weekend retreats and regional conferences. He was walking two fingers across his open palm as if to illustrate a story about someone running.

  Deciding to wait for a more private moment to talk to him, I studied an orientation packet until the loudspeakers announced that the seminar was about to begin, whereupon we filed into a vast auditorium with sloped stadium seating that ringed an oval stage on which a thick wooden podium stood like a tree trunk. I sat between Max and Ravi and arranged my handheld devices on the pull-out desktop. Calibrated the personal light settings. Stretched and cracked my neck. Max ate a thick chocolate donut and held a cheese Danish in his lap.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “You could have gotten your own.”

  “I’ve quit eating sweets as part of my post-surgery diet.”

  On the stage down below a man in a dark brown suit approached the podium and clipped a microphone to his tie just below the knot. Tapping it twice, he said, “Good morning. My name is Denver Stevens, and I’m the PASE corporate activities director. I’d like to begin today’s events by saying that although they are open to men of all faiths and creeds, our approach will use techniques and ideas developed in Prescription for a Superior Existence. This powerful spiritual system, parts of which will become familiar to you today, can help liberate you from the dangers of overintimacy at the workplace.”